The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University

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Author QuotedOliver St. John Gogarty
Title QuotedWeek End in the Middle of the Week: and other Essays on the Bias
Date (Year/Month/Day)1960/09/09
Imprint[S.l.] : [s.n.]. 1958
QuotationBrought back from the library, for light reading, O[liver] St. John Gogarty's Week End in the Middle of the Week and could not stand it. Empty, absurd, it antagonized me. That peculiar type of emptiness (which requires a peculiar type of snotty audience) I tend to label (perhaps unjustly) as fascist. So I turned to a paperback of E. M. Forster's, Abinger Harvest [New York, 1953] and this, on the contrary, I find charming and alive. And I agree, and I delight in listening, and in agreeing. It is a voice that comforts me, it is a voice of a world to which I still belong and am proud to belong-of humanism and, culturally, of Catholicity. (Yet Gogarty is the Irishman of the two and Forster the English protestant.) I have to be humble to take serious thought in having to say Forster is my kind of person (I hope).
Quotation SourceTurning Toward the World: The Pivotal Years. The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 4, 1960-1963.; Edited by Victor A. Kramer. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1996, p. 44
Letter to 
Notes 
Link to Merton's Copy  

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